Category: Memoir

My Journey of States-25 Michigan

10/17/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
I have a lot of novels that I haven't finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it's not going anywhere. I don't publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Born March 8, 1960
Detroit, Michigan

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twenty-fifth post of fifty.

Michigan (1976)

R. Jespers, Lighthouse, Lake Michigan, 1976

My only encounter with Michigan came in 1976 when Ken and I traveled to the upper Midwest to see his friends who lived in and around Kalamazoo, where Ken had taught for several years. We were there over the Fourth of July holiday, and the weather was so cool and rainy most of the time that we wore jackets and long pants. I’d never seen such lush gardens, so many aged and massive trees. One of the graduating classes that Ken taught sponsored a reunion every five years. Actually, it was a group of people that had rather adopted Ken and for a while they all lived in a large house they called the Pleasure Palace. Ken has attended several of these reunions.

Michigan is the twenty-sixth state and celebrated its sesquicentennial in 1987.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware
3-Texas     15. New York
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut
5-Missouri 17. Colorado
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas
7-Indiana   19. California
8-Ohio 20. Florida
9-Pennsylvania 21-Mississippi
10-West VA   22. New Mexico
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee
12. Virginia 24. Arizona

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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My Journey of States-24 Arizona

9/26/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
As gun owners, my husband and I understand that the Second Amendment is most at risk when a criminal or deranged person commits a gun crime. These acts only embolden those who oppose gun ownership. Promoting responsible gun laws protects the Second Amendment and reduces lives lost from guns.
Gabrielle Giffords
Born June 8, 1970 Tucson, Arizona

G. Giffords

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twenty-fourth post of fifty.

ARIZONA (1975, 1993, 2004, 2017)

I first made it to Arizona when, in 1975, I accompanied a couple of friends who wanted to drive to Phoenix from Lubbock. It was in June, and while Texas is certainly hot at that time of the year, it has nothing on Phoenix. One evening, as the sun went down and the temperature fell to 102°, someone was heard to say that it was nice that things had cooled off. Anyway . . . we spent a great deal of time either in a pool or inside bars with AC.

The second time I visited the state was in 1993, when I drove my mother and father out to visit my mother’s sister, who lived in Mesa. Again, June. Again, hot! I met two of Mother’s cousins, and when we all sat in a circle in one cousin’s living room, Mother looked more at home than I’d seen her in years, more genteel, more loquacious. She was at home! We visited a friend, an interior designer who’d bought an old adobe home and was remodeling it. Dinner with him was a respite from hauling the folks around.

R. Jespers, Santa Rita Mountains, Arizona — 2004

Ken and I visited Arizona again in 2004, staying with a cousin from my father’s side of the family, as well as working in a visit with my late mother’s cousin, whose wife and he greeted us with great hospitality, a meal, and a jar of preserves.

From Our Hotel Room, Gilbert, Arizona — 2017

In 2017, I visited my aunt who lives in Mesa, eighty-six at the time. She called together all my cousins, one of whom I hadn’t seen since we were children (see below). More of my family resides in Arizona than any other state in the union.

Jespers and Summers Cousins with Grandma & Grandpa Richards —1960

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware
3-Texas     15. New York
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut
5-Missouri 17. Colorado
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas
7-Indiana   19. California
8-Ohio 20. Florida
9-Pennsylvania 21-Mississippi
10-West VA   22. New Mexico
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee
12. Virginia

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Bullets Into Bells

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My Journey of States-23 Tennessee

9/19/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
You must be in tune with the times and [be] prepared to break with tradition.
James Agee
Born November 27, 1909 Knoxville TN
Died May 16, 1955 New York City

J. Agee

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twenty-third post of fifty.

TENNESSEE (1974)

When my in-laws came to Lubbock, in 1974, to see their daughter receive her master’s degree from Texas Tech, they brought bags of money with them (well, it seemed like it), and the four of us drove to Washington, DC, where then wife and I interviewed for teaching jobs with the same district in Fairfax County, Virginia. We took I-40 for much of the way, through the long, slim state of Tennessee, spending one night there. By that time in August, it was cool and rainy, and we did no sightseeing: no Graceland, no Grand Ole Opry, no Hermitage. More the reason to go back one day.

Tennessee was the sixteenth state admitted to the union and celebrated its bicentennial in 1996. No wonder the people of Tennessee are so proud of their Vols. Their state goes back to the eighteenth century!

historical postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware
3-Texas     15. New York
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut
5-Missouri 17. Colorado
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas
7-Indiana   19. California
8-Ohio 20. Florida
9-Pennsylvania 21-Mississippi
10-West VA 22. New Mexico
11-Maryland
12. Virginia

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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My Journey of States-22 New Mexico

9/12/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
Why do we smile? Why do we laugh? Why do we feel alone? Why are we sad and confused?Why do we read poetry? Why do we cry when we see a painting? Why is there a riot in the heart when we love? Why do we feel shame? What is that thing in the pit of your stomach called desire?
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Born August 16, 1954 Doña Ana County NM

B. Sáenz

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twenty-second post of fifty.

New Mexico (1972-2018)

L to R, T to B: B&W images, Santa Fe | Ken and Friend Naomi in Taos | Larry & Deb, Cloudcroft | Larry, White Sands

The first time I visited New Mexico was during the Christmas holidays in 1972, when M, my then wife, and I rented a crude little cabin in the skiing village of Cloudcroft. Thirty months into our wedded bliss, she and I were experiencing problems. I was in therapy and had given myself permission to sleep in a separate bed. Such a policy did not make for a very felicitous first Christmas vacation away from the folks, but I made the best of it. We both took a morning of skiing lessons. Every time I encountered M, her legs were splayed, still trying to master the snowplow—so unlike the graceful woman who handled water skis as if they were duck’s feet (not a comment on their size). I wasn’t magnificent, but I was able to come down one of the minor paths without stopping, falling, or tumbling—all afternoon long. And . . . I met a nineteen-year-old young un who thought I was pretty swell and struck up a recurring conversation as he and I met at the bottom of the run.

Making my home in West Texas for over forty years, I’ve sojourned to New Mexico innumerable times: Albuquerque and Taos for writing workshops and to visit friends; Santa Fe for Thanksgivings at the La Fonda Hotel; visits to Roswell, Cloudcroft, Ruidoso, Carlsbad, and more. Ken and I might have moved there at any time, save for one factor: $$. New Mexico is a very expensive state in which to live, particularly Santa Fe and Taos.

New Mexico has a history more ancient than the length of its statehood would indicate. The Spanish intersected with the indigenous people about 1598. The French in the 1700s. The Texans in the 1800s. No wonder those with Texas tags on their cars still get dirty looks (or worse) when they pass over the state line. At any rate, New Mexico is the site of more art, more poetry, and more novels than one can name in one breath. To visit the Land of Enchantment is to visit gentle people and gorgeous scenery.

As the forty-seventh state, New Mexico celebrated its centennial in 2012.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware
3-Texas     15. New York
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut
5-Missouri 17. Colorado
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas
7-Indiana   19. California
8-Ohio 20. Florida
9-Pennsylvania 21-Mississippi
10-West VA
11-Maryland
12. Virginia

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Pam Houston's Contents May Have Shifted

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My Journey of States-21 Mississippi

9/5/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
William Faulkner
Born September 25, 1897 New Albany, MS
Died July 6, 1962 Byhalia, MS

W. Faulkner

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twenty-first post of fifty.

Mississippi (1971, 1994)

R. Jespers, 1971, Laurel, MS

R. Jespers, 1971

I first saw Mississippi in 1971 when I was almost twenty-three years old. The Bahamian woman I’d married had an aunt who lived in Laurel. For spring break we borrowed a friend’s Ford Galaxie station wagon and traversed the five hundred miles on I-20 and a few other roads. My ex-wife’s aunt, a smoker, was so unlike her sister, my mother-in-law, and yet the aunt was similar to my ex-wife in that America also had corrupted her cute little Bahamian accent. But M and I had a cozy double bed to ourselves and as still-newlyweds who couldn’t think of anything better to do, we made good use of it.

The second time I encountered Mississippi was in 1994 when another spouse, Ken, and I drove from Lubbock to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We stopped long enough in Vicksburg to view the Mississippi River near the famed bridge, and then we were off. I would like to return one day, to find out more about Mississippi's literary figures: Faulkner and Welty, to mention a couple.

Mississippi, the twentieth state, celebrated its bicenntenial in 2017.

Historical Postcards & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware
3-Texas     15. New York
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut
5-Missouri 17. Colorado
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas
7-Indiana   19. California
8-Ohio 20. Florida
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA
11-Maryland
12. Virginia

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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Potter's Cookbook Exacting Yet Flexible

8/31/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
I did not want my tombstone to read, “She kept a really clean house.” I think I'd like them to remember me by saying, “She opened government to everyone.”
Ann Richards
Born August 31, 1933

A. Richards

My Book World

Potter, Margaret Yardley. At Home on the
Range. With a foreword by Elizabeth
Gilbert and introduction by the author.
San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2012.

This book was originally published by Potter in 1947 and may be the second cookbook I’ve ever read from cover-to-cover (the other, Mildred O. Knopf’s Memoirs of a Cook). Often, I’ll casually peruse the contents, checking out the ingredients of a particular recipe, to see if I might like to prepare it. But At Home on the Range is no ordinary cookbook. The author seems to create a story with each recipe. Even its presentation on the page defies modern conventions where one lists the ingredients above and directions below. No, Potter’s entire recipe is frequently a delightful but informative narrative, giving one the most minute detail about how to prepare it. Here is a notable example:

CHICKEN CACCIATORE is made for six with 2 three-pound frying chickens cut up, dusted with flour, salt and pepper, and browned in ½ cup of olive oil. Fish out the chicken, put the pieces in a casserole, and add to the oil a chopped garlic clove, 1 cup of chopped onions, and an optional pinch of sweet basil and rosemary. When the onions are soft, pour in 1 can of tomatoes and 2 tablespoons of tomato paste. Let this simmer for 15 minutes. Pour over the chickens, cover tightly, and cook in a 350° oven for 45 minutes. Serve it with buttered boiled spaghetti, and pass the grated Romano or Parmesan cheese (51).

I’ve prepared perhaps a half a dozen different recipes for chicken cacciatore (my late Italian uncle informed me cacciatore means “of the hunter,” intimating a certain flexibility of contents), but I find this one fascinating. First, Potter uses different phraseology, “dusted with flour,” instead of perhaps the more common “dredged;” she specifies “fish out the chicken,” instead of “remove the chicken”; “pass the Romano or Parmesan cheese” instead of “sprinkle with,” subtly indicating that cheese is an option. “Buttered boiled spaghetti,” however, sounds a bit redundant to today’s ear. Second, Potter departs from most cacciatore recipes by preparing the sauce separately and then pouring it over the chicken; most directions require one to add all ingredients following the browning of the chicken (usually with garlic and onion). And finally, her recipe is baked in the oven instead of simmering in a skillet or Dutch oven.

Overall, Potter’s directions are exacting yet flexible, her opinions strong, so much so that I shall have to try this one, too, just to see how it tastes—not to mention the other two dozen recipes I’ve marked with Post-It arrows! McSweeney’s has recreated the original end papers and added engaging chapter fonts, as well as pert little illustrations, giving the book its historical and artistic due. If you love to cook AND read, you'll love this book.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-21 Mississippi

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My Journey of States-20 Florida

8/29/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
I believe the root of all evil is abuse of power.
Patricia Cornwell
Born June 9, 1956 Miami, Florida

C. Cornwell

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twentieth post of fifty.

FLORIDA (1968, 1984, 2003)

St. George Hotel, Spanish Wells, Bahamas

The first time I visited Florida, it was to pass through by way of Miami onto the Bahamas, a far superior spot, I believed. My plane, a two-prop job resembling a large goose, nearly went down in a violent thunderstorm, or so I was inclined to believe. I was head-over-ankles in love with a girl for the first time in my life, or otherwise I would never have traveled that far to stay in the home of strangers who just happened to be that girl’s parents. Two years later I would marry her and we would be given a large formal wedding in Trinity Methodist Church of Nassau and a formal reception at the Sheraton British Colonial Hotel. A friend from college would fly down to play the organ for the service. My brother, seventeen, would join the party as my best man and promptly get a bit drunk from drinking too much champagne.

R. Jespers, Bahamas, 1970

After spending more than two months in the Bahamas, I got a little sick of island life. It had never occurred to me, a landlubber, that I would tire of seeing the same people every day, that if all you had to do at the beach was grow browner, the experience might wear thin. That a city with only one movie theater was probably a little devoid of culture. I was too young to accept life as it comes to you, that the Bahamians have a unique culture going back hundreds of years. Though I would later divorce one really beautiful Bahamian, I would always recall the island’s inimitable treats: broiled crawfish, conch salad, peas and rice, and, oh God, baked grouper! Water skiing and hand trawling from a seventeen-foot outboard boat over swells larger than some hills in Kansas (see my catch above). And always aquamarine waters, a hue from which people concocted the idea to paint swimming pools.

Key West would be my destination in 1984, when I would tag along with two scuba-diving fiends, uh, friends. We stayed at an ever-popular gay establishment, The Pines bed and breakfast. Enough said. Again, got browner. Gorged myself on seafood, and, though my life partner was not with me, I behaved myself and only flirted with men gathered around the B&B’s tiny pool. Ten years later, one of the friends would die of AIDS, but I shall always recall the gales of laughter the three of us could create via those tiny in-jokes that only intimates can tell.

R. Jespers, Key West, 2003

In 2003, I attended a writers’ conference in Key West. A famous gay writer I’d always admired conducted our seminar, and I was pleased to be part of the group. I went in January thinking that the weather would be pleasant. I arrived in a gale of wind out of the north, and at the hotel I was placed in a freestanding cabin with no heat. No heat. I piled a couple of quilts on my bed, and that seemed to do the trick. In the remaining time, weather remained cool, almost like bright autumn days in New England! I purchased a heavy sweatshirt because I’d failed to heed the email warning sent by the conference’s leader. It was anything but a fun-in-the-sun event I’d anticipated. Note to self: never take another January trip to Florida. It may be just as nice in West Texas at that time of the year.

Florida, the twenty-seventh state, celebrated its sesquicentennial in 1995.

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware
3-Texas     15. New York
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut
5-Missouri 17. Colorado
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas
7-Indiana 19. California
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA
11-Maryland
12. Virginia

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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My Journey of States-19 California

8/22/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.
Joan Didion
Born December 5, 1934 in Sacramento

J. Didion

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the nineteenth post of fifty.

California ('67, '77, '78, '97, '06, '08)

When I visited California, in 1967, my aunt and uncle lived in Fullerton, Orange County. I was nineteen, and I had been encouraged by my mother to take side trips rather than hang around my aunt’s house all the time. I would negotiate such a concept much better later in life. The three weeks that I was there, my aunt drove me to Whittier to visit a friend I’d made while in college, also an organ student. My sixteen-year-old cousin and I took the train to San Clemente to the beach. And we made a similar trip to Disneyland. Finally, my aunt and uncle lent me their car so I could drive to Long Beach to see the S——s, a family who had once lived two houses south of us on Main Street in Wichita. Mr. S—— worked for a Long Beach newspaper, and Mrs. S—— was a registered nurse. Both of them smoked like chimneys at Christmas.

I made it my reading project to finish Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls,a summer read if ever there was one. You devour the pages just to see what happens, usually who does whom, only to feel less than satiated when it’s over—like eating a bag of potato chips in less than five minutes.

R. Jespers | Northridge CA 1977

R. Jespers | Big Sur, CA 1997

In the seventies, I visited a couple, the wife of whom I’d gone to high school with. During another trip I stayed with a guy I’d met in Hawaii the summer before. There I got the gist of what my mother had tried to teach me. I made a day-long sojourn out to see the Queen Mary in Long Beach, and three of us guys would drive up the coast to San Francisco to march in one of the first gay pride parades in 1978. I also saw the Hearst Mansion in Big Sur before it became part of the California State Park system; I visited it once again in 1997, making the trip up the mountain three times in one day to see all three tours.

K. Dixon and R. Jespers | Tomales Bay, CA 2006

In 2006 I attended a writers’ conference in Tomales Bay, and two years later I would return to the conference on one evening to hear the keynote speaker, Jane Smiley, a writer whom I admire a great deal.

I have a phobia of returning to California. I believe the Big One is slated to happen any time soon, and I just don’t want to chance it. Besides, it is one of those places long on beautiful sights and fabulous weather but also long on two-legged inhabitants, thousands of whom insist on being in the exact spot you would like to be whether it’s a queue to see Bette Midler or a trail in the woods.

California became the thirty-first state in 1850, thus celebrating its sesquicentennial in 2000.

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware
3-Texas     15. New York
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut
5-Missouri 17. Colorado
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA
11-Maryland
12. Virginia

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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My Journey of States-17 Colorado

8/8/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
You can’t really be strong until you see a funny side to things.
Ken Kesey
Born September 17, 1935, La Junta, Colorado
Died November 10, 2001, Eugene, Oregon

K. Kesey

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the seventeenth post of fifty.

Colorado (1964, 1965, 1967, 2000, 2011)

In my youth I was a church goer, mostly by default, de fault of my mother (har har). Our youth group spent two different week-long sessions in retreat at a cabin our minister owned near Silverton. It was a ten-hour drive from Wichita, and some of we luckier kids rode in the education director’s car, which had a rather new innovation: factory-installed air conditioning. You weren’t exhausted from the wind whipping your face hour after hour or from its roar in your ears. Your skin didn’t stick to the seats. She even let some of us drive! The retreats were great. Short on Bible and theological discussions and long on FUN. We hiked, made day-long climbs up particular mountains, cooked outside. And it was cool! No AC was needed as it was back in Wichita.

On my flight back from LA in 1967, my plane stopped in Denver. As I was flying standby, I was bumped from the flight to Wichita . . . late at night. I called my mother to explain what had happened. She encouraged me to spend the night in the airport, just sleeping on a bench, as she had during World War II, waiting for a train. I’d seen too many movies about people sleeping on hard benches and declared that I was staying in a motel. And I then lifted one of those white courtesy phones connected directly to a motel and took its shuttle. The room cost me eleven dollars, and I tipped the bell hop fifty cents and had no idea whether that was too much or too little. It had just rained and was in the mid-fifties. The air, after I had lived with the smog-filled air of LA for two weeks, seemed splendiferous, providing a natural AC.

In this century we’ve stayed with friends in Grand Lake (2000) and in Denver (2000 & 2011). In 2014 we drove widely around Denver on E-470, a toll road, not really wishing to partake of its urban sprawl. We spent the night in Pueblo, taking short trips out to see things such as Rosemount and the raptor center.

The Colorado Centennial was celebrated in 1976, the same year as the nation’s bicentennial year, the same year Ken and I began our longtime relationship.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware
3-Texas     15. New York
4-Louisiana   16. Connecticut
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA
11-Maryland
12. Virginia

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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My Journey of States-16 Connecticut

8/1/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Born June 14, 1811 Litchfield CT
Died July 1, 1896 Hartford CT

H. Stowe

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the sixteenth post of fifty.

Connecticut (1957, 1959, 2003, 2006, 2008, 2012)

The greatest thing about Connecticut may be that it’s not New York. To me, the Merritt Parkway is emblematic of the state: quaint, a bit pastoral, and yet sophisticated. My paternal grandmother lived in Stamford in a smart little apartment many years before moving back to Holland to live out her waning days (she lived to be eighty-eight).

Several of the apartment buildings had green awnings over the main door, and I told my four-year-old brother that one of them was where Grandma lived, as a joke, when I knew it was indeed the one we parked nearest. As soon as we got out of the car, my brother dashed across the busy street to the one I’d said was Grandma’s. My mother knew immediately why he’d done it and practically choked me. I was a bad boy. Thankfully, Vic must have known what he was doing for no catastrophe resulted.

I believe Ken and I drove through the state the very afternoon that Paul Newman’s death was announced on the NPR station we were listening to in our rental, mere miles from where both he and my father had lived, at different times. It seemed like a strange juxtaposition: my father’s birthplace, Paul Newman’s death. To whom was it more of a home?

In 2010 we visited Mark Twain’s home and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s in Hartford. In 2012 we met up with a friend I’d gone to Southwestern College with, who now lives near Hartford. It was a great autumn weekend, and we watched wild turkey feed in my friend’s suburban back yard.

Connecticut is fifth of the original states, having been established in 1788.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas 13. New Jersey
2-Oklahoma 14. Delaware
3-Texas 15. New York
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA
11-Maryland
12. Virginia

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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Defeating A Fib at Last-4

7/30/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
I look back on my twenties. It's supposed to be the prime of your life, the most vital, the most beautiful. But you're making your critical decisions and sometimes your most critical mistakes.
Ann Brashares
Born July 30, 1967

A. Brashares

This post is last in a series of four, in which I tell of my fifteen-year battle with atrial fibrillation and my efforts to conquer it. Click on Parts One, Two, or Three to take a look at prior installments. Today I continue with my recovery from the June 20th procedure at St. Davids' Medical Center in Austin.

History of an Ablation

On June 21, 2018, I rose at six-thirty a.m. but felt rested. Had a pleasant conversation with Nurse Jennie who is from Vietnam. She gave me a Lasix infusion to help me urinate. Dr. Gallinghouse came in at seven-thirty. He said everything went great. Inside of the heart looked as he had thought it would but felt that the work he’d done would provide the hardened tissue needed for blocking the errant electric signals. (I guess; the procedure is still somewhat of a mystery to me.) He will have me continue my current medications until further notice. For a couple of weeks I’ll be on Carafate, a high-powered antacid, which will help any irritation that may have taken place near the esophagus, where he worked. Ken arrived at eight-thirty, missing the doctor’s visit. A young man with dreadlocks said he was going to help me shower and remove the surgical tape covering my groin wounds.

Word came down that I might be dismissed before noon. Frankly, I believed they would need the space ASAP. When things were expedited, the shower was eighty-sixed. I might have needed some help because the surgical tape was so powerful it could have been used to patch broken plumping. It was so strong that it tore skin from my body when I carefully removed it myself.

Out at eleven a.m.

I posted on FB that everything had gone well. In fact, I’d posted twice before the procedure, once while I was in the first holding room, and then again after I was in my room and I took a picture of the marker board stating: “Monitor groin areas overnight.” Two of my friends gave me some real grief over that, all in good fun, of course.

In closing, Doctor Gallinghouse is a very personable, passionate, and intelligent gentleman with a great haircut, using some of the most sophisticated knowledge and equipment at his fingertips at Saint David’s. More important, his heart is in the right place, caring more about ridding people of the annoying, debilitating, and potentially harmful condition known as A Fib than riches or fame. The organization of which he is a part--Texas Cardiac Arrhythmia Institute—is by many accounts one of the best, if not the best, medical centers of its kind in the country, if not the world. I’m NOT engaging in hyperbole! People from other countries journey to Austin every week to have this superior level of ablation performed. I can’t speak highly enough of the Saint David’s and TCA staff members. Each and every individual I came in contact with was exceedingly competent, helpful, and caring. And caring. I can’t say that enough: caring!

In the days since the ablation (thirty-seven and counting), I have NOT experienced one twinge of A Fib. I feel that the repair has increased blood flow to all parts of the body. I am now able to bend over or stoop down without triggering an episode or becoming dizzy when I stand. I can now do my complete Pilates workout without having to worry. I returned to achieving my 10,000+ steps per day within a week! I feel great, and I hope I never take that feeling for granted ever again.

If you are experiencing atrial fibrillation or believe you have its symptoms, I encourage you to contact TCA in Austin, Texas and make an appointment. Their surgeons meet with people from all over the state, so be sure and check with the Austin office for a cardiologist near you. And finally, if you’re worried about costs, consider that Medicare and insurance companies are willing to pay for this procedure because in the long run it reduces their costs. (Warfarin tests, drug expenses, appointments, cardioversions, and other charges add up over the years.) In fact, I have by now received the bill for my share of the expenses at St. David's, and my insurances covered all but 5%—an amount I can live with.

If you have any questions, please message me using the contact box on my Home page (I no longer have a Facebook account), and I’ll try to answer or put you in touch with someone who can. You or those whom you love no longer have to suffer! Also, if I’ve misstated anything, please inform me, so I can correct it. Thanks.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-16 Connecticut

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Defeating A Fib at Last-3

7/23/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
Raymond Chandler
Born July 23, 1888

R. Chandler

This post is third in a series of four, in which I tell of my fifteen-year battle with atrial fibrillation and my efforts to conquer it. Click on Part One or Part Two to take a look at prior installments, if you missed them. Today I continue with a description of the June 20th procedure at St. Davids' Medical Center in Austin.

History of an Ablation

On June 20, at Saint David's Medical Center @stdavidsmedctr, in Austin, Texas—in association with Texas Cardiac Arrhythmia Institute @tcainstitute—Doctor Joe Gallinghouse @GallinghouseMD performed an ablation on my heart. Doctor Gallinghouse is one of the preeminent doctors in this field, worldwide, and I felt very fortunate to be in his care. Ablation is a process just short of a miracle. Sending a scope up arteries on either side of the groin, Doctor Gallinghouse used energy (re: heat) to ablate five key places inside the heart, correcting the errant electric impulses that had been causing the heart to misfire. The procedure hardens areas of the heart which then block those wild electronic impulses—causing the heart to beat in a normal sinus rhythm. I’ve not had any symptoms since before June 20. More than thirty days and counting!

The day began at 7:00 a.m., as usual, except that I had no breakfast, of course. While I scoured my body in the shower, Ken had something to eat in the hotel restaurant. We used Uber to get to St. David’s. Again the driver had some difficulty (or else it was his app) finding our hotel. I finally had to enter the address again! It was amusing watching the phone screen as that little black car kept turning around!

We knew exactly where the hospital's main entrance was because we had scouted it out the day before. I got checked in after more filling out of a form on a tablet. There was a man who served as sort of concierge, making it the most efficient hospital check-in I’ve ever seen. Then more answers to more questions ad infinitum—perhaps a truth-check to make sure facts are consistent? I was then placed in a “holding” room for over two hours, dressed in an odd-patterned gown of oranges and browns. During that time, lying on my back on one of those comfortable gurneys, I met my anesthesiologist, then an assistant/intern, and consented to become involved in two different tests or studies: 1) To check if half-saline solution would work as efficiently as the usual saline solution. Preliminary studies show yes. 2) I can’t recall the second study . . .

Then off to the next holding room, which was colder, three walls with a fourth facing the hallway and only a flimsy curtain. And . . . oh, yes . . . yet another nurse named Clayton who would roll me into the OR soon enough; he was a Labrador retriever in nature, friendly, nurturing, smart and alert. As I lay there alone, I used my usual meditation mantras to try and relax. There was noise coming from every direction as I waited. I believed it was the OR doors opening (and I would be right), and the roar of tech would emerge as well as heavy metal rock music. Please don’t play raucous music during my procedure, I pleaded. Maybe some Mozart, Debussy?

I sent my silent message down the hall, imagining it taking wing as it fled through banging doors, noisy alarms, and raised voices. Not complaining. It’s just the way of a well-functioning contemporary hospital! In another thirty minutes Clayton rolled me across the hall to the OR, which he stated was kept at fifty-eight degrees. I asked why so cold, and he said it was to keep the technical equipment cool, but also the staff (I later learned it also cuts down on bacteria growth). Clayton was kind enough to place some heated blankets over me.

At that point, three chatty female nurses began to prep me for the procedure, having me slide from the gurney to the table, sliding a hose pumping warm air under my blanket. Thank Christ. They hooked up the IV into my left forearm. Then I realized they were engaging me.
"You are NOT seventy," one of them proclaimed.
"I can show you my birth certificate," I said.
"We just want to know what your secret is."
"Good, clean living," I quipped.
"I missed out on that a long time ago," one of them said.
"I think it’s probably just good dee enn aaye," as my voice slowed, and I went under. Probably their ploy all along. We always flatter patients. That helps them relax and get out of themselves so the anesthesia can do its job.

I didn’t recall anything after that until I woke up in the recovery room with the words that everything had gone well. Rather than literal heart burn, I was experiencing more pain in my groin areas where the scopes had traveled up through arteries to my heart. I was put into a private room about six. Ken helped me negotiate my way until about seven-thirty when he took off for the hotel. He had had a rougher day than me, speaking on his phone periodically to Clayton to see where I was in the process—sitting, sitting, sitting.

I ate some chicken noodle soup and an entire baked potato. My sugar levels were a bit above average, and the nurse offered to give me a shot of insulin. Since I’m not a diagnosed diabetic and because it was offered as an option, I passed. I took my usual night pills at nine p.m. I ate some ice cream at ten-thirtyish and finished watching Rachel Maddow. Finally to bed after midnight. The nurse gave me five mg. of Ambien—enough to help me drowse between her visits. I did like it that she informed me when she would be back at three thirty and then again at fiveish—like most nights when I have get up to pee. Return next week as I conclude my story.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-15 New York

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My Journey of States-14 Delaware

7/18/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
Sleep brings dreams; and dreams are often most vivid and fantastical before we have yet been wholly lost in slumber.
Robert Montgomery Bird
Born February 5, 1806,
in New Castle, Delaware
Died January 23, 1854

R Bird

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the fourteenth post of fifty.

Delaware (1957)

Old Luggage Decal

Delaware is one of those states I can claim to have visited, but which I know little about. I simply traveled through the edge of the state to get to another. I hope to come back one day, since it is first of the original thirteen colonies. ¶ “It is known as the ‘First State,’” according to Delaware Historical Society, “because on December 7, 1787, it became the first to ratify the U.S. Constitution. In 1610 explorer Samuel Argall named the Delaware River and Bay for the governor of Virginia, Thomas West, Lord De La Warr. The state of Delaware takes its name from the river and bay.” ¶ The state’s bicenquinquagenary was also celebrated in 2012.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas 13. New Jersey
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA
11-Maryland
12. Virginia

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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Defeating A Fib at Last-2

7/16/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
I had a dream, in 1985, I believe, when a friend I'd gone to school with was sick—one of the first people I knew who'd gotten the AIDS virus. I had a dream of him in his bedroom with an angel crashing through the ceiling. I wrote a poem called “Angels in America.” I've never looked at the poem since the day I wrote it.
Tony Kushner
Born July 16, 1956

T. Kushner

This post is second in a series of four, in which I tell of my fifteen-year battle with atrial fibrillation and my efforts to conquer it. Click on Part One to take a look at last week's installment. if you missed it. Today I continue with the lead-up to the June 20th procedure at St. Davids' Medical Center in Austin.

HISTORY OF AN ABLATION

J. Gallinghouse

For a long time I was wary of having the ablation procedure done (They go inside your heart? I thought), as one is when one doesn’t have all the facts. When I ran into a friend who had had this procedure performed by Doctor Joe Gallinghouse, she had not experienced an episode in over a year after her ablation (it has now been over two years). I was intrigued, and kept Dr. Gallinghouse in mind (he travels twice a month to Lubbock from Austin to conduct follow-up visits, as well as consultations with potential patients). I continued to see my friend from time to time, and she would ask me how I was doing, and she would once again extol the doctor’s virtues.

One day when I had a routine appointment with my PCP’s Nurse Practitioner, I was experiencing A Fib, and my heart rate was 142. She had an EKG taken and emphatically said, when she showed me the results, “This is not pretty!” She, knowing the NP of my cardiologist, Doctor Brogan, called that office and set up an appointment with him the very next afternoon. I was still in A Fib at the time, and I informed him I was ready to consult with Doctor Gallinghouse. Brogan’s office scheduled an appointment for late April. At that time, I went in with a long list of questions, and he addressed them all and a few that Ken had for him. In all, he met with us for thirty-five to forty minutes—valuable as gold.

Monday, June 18, 2018
Ken and I used Uber as a trial run to get to St. David’s Hospital, where I shall meet with Dr. Gallinghouse’s PA tomorrow. The ride went without a hitch, and the driver was flexible enough to drop us at the Garage #2 where Dr. Gallinghouse’s office is located on the seventh floor. We took the elevator up, and the receptionist told Ken where he would find the cafeteria on Wednesday.

Later we walked from the hospital to the LBJ Presidential Library—fifteen minutes. The heat got to Ken so we won’t be doing that again soon. I didn’t like it either; I hate getting sweaty with good clothes on. While we wandered among the exhibits, I kept thinking ahead to Wednesday! Not good. Took Uber back to Holiday Inn Midtown.

There, I had a meal of fish tacos and potato crisps, both of which were spicy, but I enjoyed them. Buttered, steamed broccoli—al dente, just right. Return next week for Defeating A Fib at Last-3, when I head into the OR!

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-14 Delaware

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Still Raising Savages

7/13/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone.
Jane Hamilton
Born July 13, 1957

J. Hamilton

My Book World

Jackson, Shirley. Raising Demons. New
York: Farrar, 1957.

I loved this sequel to Jackson’s first memoir about family, Life Among the Savages. For those readers who might think that a successful writer with a family of four children (five if you count her husband) might neglect any of them, such readers should take note of the following passage, in which a mother who is in full grasp of the personality of each one of her children writes:

“It has long been my belief that in times of great stress, such as a four-day vacation, the thin veneer of family unity wears off almost at once, and we are revealed in our true personalities; Laurie, for instance, is a small-town mayor, Jannie a Games Mistress, Sally a vague, stern old lady watching the rest of us with remote disapproval, and Barry a small intrepid foot soldier, following unquestioningly and doggedly. The two nervous creatures hovering in the background, making small futile gestures and tending to laugh weakly, are, of course, unmistakable. They are there to help with the luggage. These several personalities began to emerge in the car driving to Albany, and Sally’s hat began to unravel” (237)

Shirley Jackson may have been the first Tiger Mother as she reared her four children in the 1950s. Now, I don’t mean that she micromanaged their lives, but she did see, by her own accounting, that they were properly cared for, not just in terms of the basics like food and clothing, but also their emotional and psychological development. She knew the essence of each child and attempted to open up the world to them, or, at the very least, she stayed out of their way. She allowed Laurie to be all boy, Sally to be a starry-eyed spinner of tales, Jannie to be just as bossy as her mother, and Barry, the youngest, he was allowed to drink in the wonder of life. Who could ask for more? (Perhaps her children’s memoirs would reveal a different dynamic).

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-14 Delaware

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'Forty Autumns' a Moving Memoir

5/4/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
It's impossible to control the reception of your work—the only thing you can control is the experience of writing itself, and the work you create.
Kim Edwards
Born May 4, 1958

K. Edwards

My Book World

Willner, Nina. Forty Autumns: A Family’s
Story of Courage and Survival on Both
Sides of the Berlin Wall. New York:
Morrow, 2016.

Just under twenty-one, young Hanna flees East Germany to pursue a life of freedom in the West, and she must do it twice to succeed. The second escape, however, sticks, and she makes a life in America.

Her daughter, Nina, is the author of this amazing and absorbing account of what the division of Germany following World War II did to Hanna’s family. Under the heavy thumb of Erich Honecker, the East German regime was perhaps more repressive than its mother, the Soviet Union.

This forty-year tale follows the lives of those left in East Germany, as well as the life of Hanna and her children in America. Daughter Nina winds up working for the US government in West Germany and comes very close to where her family lives, but she is unable to visit with them or even let them know she is present.

Hanna’s father, Opa, is a respected and revered school teacher in the town where they live, but eventually he is exiled to a small village because he will not fully support the Communist line. His children who remain in East Germany, however, become somewhat more compliant, although none of them ever joins the Communist party—which does inhibit their success.

Wellner’s story of how the family finally unites after forty autumns is more than touching; it is the richest kind of poignancy.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-13 New Jersey

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My Journey of States-11 Maryland

4/25/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.
Lucille Clifton
Poet Laureate of Maryland
Born June 27, 1936
Died February 13, 2010

L. Clifton

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the eleventh post of fifty.

Maryland (1957, 1959, 1963)

L-R: Lou, Carol, Richard, Victor | 1963 Visit to DC

In 1963, I was fifteen when we visited Aunt Gladys in Washington, DC. My cousin was seventeen, and he and his sophisticated friends invited me to go with them to the beach in Maryland. On our way we stopped in at Nordstrom’s in the Seven Corners shopping center. I watched as my sophisticated cousin and his friends shoplifted identical plaid swim trunks. We rode out in a red Impala convertible, and when the traffic backed up surprisingly, the driver, one of my cousin’s friends, headed for the soft grass median rather than rear-end someone. ¶ At this Maryland beach, my cousin and his friends looked like they all belonged to the same fraternity and flirted with girls older than they were just for the fun of it. I never told my parents what my cousin had done. It was one of those events that advanced your childhood pretty quickly, traveling with delinquents, and you knew you could never go back. ¶ In the Baltimore neighborhood where my aunt and uncle lived in 1957, people attached ceramic cats, mostly black, to the roofs and sides of their homes, perhaps as a way of identifying theirs as they approached it on the street. My dad bought one before leaving for Kansas and it hung on the side of their house in Wichita for over fifty years. ¶ Maryland became seventh of the original thirteen states in 1788. Its bicenquinquagenary was celebrated in 2013.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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Life Among the Savages Still Delightful

4/20/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
One of the advantages of the book's [The Best Little Boy in the World] having been out there for more than a quarter century is that there's been time for people to report back on what it's done for them.
Andrew Tobias
Born April 20, 1947

A. Tobias

My Book World

Jackson, Shirley. Life Among the Savages.
New York: Farrar, 1948.

Jackson’s memoir about family life up through the birth of her fourth and final child is entertaining and timeless, though it is written in the 1940s. What contributes to this timelessness is Jackson’s grasp of the universal through developing the specific.

This is a woman’s story to tell, though it is for everyone to read. Jackson published many of these narratives in women’s magazines before releasing them in this book. She develops the universal by delving into the concrete. She never names her husband: it is always my husband this, my husband that, objectifying him as the head-in-the-clouds academic that he is, in the same manner in which she, as housewife, is objectified in this post-World War II period. She has pet names for her oldest three children: Laurie for Laurence (which he vehemently sluffs off at one point); Jannie for Joanne, and Sally for Sarah. It’s as if by naming them something more intimate, they cannot possibly belong to someone else, the world at large.

What saves her persona from being a martyr is that Jackson actually enjoys being a mother and wife while at the same time pursuing a serious career as a writer of fiction. She would be considered a permissive mother, but such a free household allows all her children to develop unfettered: Laurie is allowed to take on a boisterous, all-boy personality; Jannie develops as one who expresses herself as bluntly as Jackson herself does; and charming little Sally is a princess, who quotes fairy tales and talks in oblique sort of riddles when she is angry about something. To be sure, Jackson spars with her children (and her husband) on occasion, nudges them back and forth over the goal line, but she allows them simply to be. One would love to know how they developed as adults, and how their children fared.

This free and delightful yet sophisticated read is timeless and should be perused by everyone: women and men, old and young, especially those who think they know everything about raising children. They could learn a thing or two from the late Shirley Jackson.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-11 Maryland

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My Journey of States-10 West Virginia

4/18/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible—and achieve it, generation after generation.
Pearl S. Buck
Born in Hillsboro, West Virginia
June 26, 1892
Died March 6, 1973

P. Buck

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the tenth post of fifty.

West Virginia (1957, 1959, 1963)

Our car, accustomed to the prairies of Kansas, labored up the mountains of West Virginia, on our way to and from Aunt Gladys’s place in suburban DC. I recall some delightful cinnamon apple candy that we purchased every time we passed through a certain town (or maybe it was in Virginia). It seemed like a primitive place, but that may not be a child’s observation, but a jaded adult who, to this day, doesn’t like to pee in an outdoor closet that stinks from lye. ¶ Now that West Virginia has joined the Big Twelve, I pay more attention to the state. They’re tough to beat at home, especially when a proud bunch of fans fill up the place to cheer on their Mountaineers. ¶ West Virginia was part of Virginia until 1863, when it was granted its own statehood, making it the thirty-fifth state. In 2013, it celebrated its sesquicentennial.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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Famous Mother and Son Ponder Lives

2/16/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
I've heard people on panels say, “You must have a Web site. You need to tweet. Repeat the title of your book constantly,” and I just want to say, “Shut up. Everything you're saying is wrong.” People will know instantly if your only motivation for tweeting is to sell books.
Maureen Johnson
Born on February 16, 1973

M. Johnson

My Book World

Cooper, Anderson and Gloria Vanderbilt. The
   Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and
   Son on Life, Love, and Loss. New York:
   HarperCollins, 2016.

The epistolary nature of this book (if emails can be considered letters) makes it interesting at times. TV journalist Anderson Cooper exchanges emails with his mother, both of them attempting to make sense of their lives as mother and son. At times, the exercise feels belabored as if Cooper is indeed a writer interviewing another celebrity. Yet there are enough genuine moments to provide readers with the feeling they’re witnessing something real. His mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, makes a startling statement:

“Although I have never told you or any one else, I did this [to work under her birth name] because I believed that if I succeeded in writing, or acting, or painting, it would expiate in some mysterious and secret way the public vilification of my mother and free her to love me as I longed to be loved” (101).

One issue that deeply affects both of their lives is the death of Anderson’s father, Wyatt Cooper. Gloria is totally dumbfounded. Anderson’s brother, Carter, will commit suicide. And Anderson himself declares his life would have been so different if his father had lived:

“I certainly longed for that sense of safety as a teenager. It would have been nice to have a male figure in those years. It always surprised me that none of the men you were friends with made an effort to reach out to Carter or me after Daddy’s death. I kept secretly hoping someone would come forward as a mentor or a friend, occasionally taking me out for a slice of pizza or to a movie” (204).

Cooper turns inward after his father’s death, obtains a fake press pass, and begins his adventurous and often dangerous career in journalism overseas. He admits that if his father had lived, he might not have burned such a trail. Lucky for us that he did.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-7 Indiana

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My Journey of States-6 Illinois

2/14/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
It's very difficult to escape your background. You know, I don't think it's necessary to even try to escape it. More and more, I start to think that it's necessary to see exactly what it is that you inherited on both ends of the stick: your timidity, your courage, your self-deceit, and your honesty—and all the rest of it.
Sam Shepard
Born Fort Sheridan, Illinois Nov. 5, 1943
Died Midway, Kentucky, July 27, 2017

S. Shepard

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the sixth post of fifty.

6. Illinois (1957, 1959, 1963, 1969, 2006)

When I was a child, Illinois was one of the four states my dad drove through in a single day as we headed to Washington DC to see my aunt and cousins. Beyond that, Illinois didn’t mean much to me until 1969, when my college choir’s tour included Chicago. In the middle of February with dirty snow piled onto the sidewalks like little mountains, a college friend and I walked under cloudy skies and chatted about what most twenty-one-year-olds do. The choir sang at a Methodist church in Evanston, and as a rising organ pupil I played the postlude. The sanctuary was cold. ¶ Even later, in 1976, Ken and I would venture across the Mississippi River to visit his grandparents’ old farm near Thebes, not far from Huck Finn’s haunt, Cairo. The humidity was so unbearable that we were drenched standing in full shade viewing his grandparents’ graves in the cemetery.

In 2006 we traveled on AmTrak from Fort Worth to New York and changed trains to the Lakeshore Limited in Chicago. We took a brisk walk around during our layover. It was early May, and the trees were just beginning to bud out. We’d already had ninety degree temps in Lubbock, so it seemed that we were stepping back in time.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

Illinois is the twenty-first state. Its centennial was held in 1918. The year 2018 will be another big one. Check it out!

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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Forgiveness for a Mother

2/2/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
Our conventions, our conventional signs have a [sic] Active function to perform; thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
Havelock Ellis
Born February 2, 1859

H. Ellis

My Book World

Alexie, Sherman. You Don’t Have to
Say You Love Me: A Memoir. New
York: Little, Brown, 2017.

I once attended one of Mr. Alexie’s readings in Iowa City; it was for his most recent publication, The Toughest Indian in the World. He’s tall and lanky; at that time his hair was of medium length. Handsome. His performance was half stand-up act, for he is acerbically, wickedly funny, and half dramatic reading in which he voiced all the parts. Not only the parts written on the lines, but you could hear the voices of his ancestors in the background, encouraging this talented young man to voice the Indian truth.

Once again, in this painful but poignant memoir in which Alexie explores the relationship with his mother, he does not fail to delight, does not fail to sear our consciousness with the wrongs of our white ancestors. Just as his skin color condemns him, an innocent man, anyone with white skin must share the blame of our ancestors who ravaged the land and its native peoples as if it were all one prehistoric wellspring of riches. The book composed of 160 short chapters is NOT linear in structure; I do not think that is a particularly Indian way to tell a story. The author begins in 1972 when his family moves into a HUD home on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington, when the author is six years old. Some chapters are as short as a four-line poem. Other chapters are poems several pages in length (including one about his mother as quilter), each one a work of art in itself, enhancing a lyricism spread throughout the entirety of the book.

By beginning with an intimate description of the HUD house, Alexie gives us a double-edged view. On the one hand, the house represents a major step up for the family from the cramped quarters where they’ve lived before. The HUD house is not huge, but it does have a toilet, a bathroom, and that means a great deal to the family. Yet these new cramped quarters are an important metaphor for the Spokane Indian, whose entire tribe has been smothered, crammed into a piece of earth that represents a fraction of what it once owned. Alexie is always shoving against these boundaries of what white people expect of Indians, knowing their place. One must wonder how this nation would have developed if the white man had approached the Indians with respect and conceded to their wishes. If the white man had purchased land instead of stealing it, what then? If the white man had formed a government with native Americans instead of one that killed them off, what would we have today? Would any of us be here?

NEXT TIME: Barcelona Photographs2 — Its People

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My Journey of States-2 Oklahoma

1/17/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
Ralph Ellison
Born March 1, 1914
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

R. Ellison

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the second post of fifty.

2 Oklahoma

Oklahoma is the state I traveled through first when I was but a toddler, on the way to Louisiana, where my father was stationed in the Air National Guard for over two years. In time I passed through Oklahoma—north to south, west to east, southwest to northeast, across the panhandle—scores of times, but I never visited anyone, rarely had any business there except to buy gas or stay in a motel, so I wouldn’t have such a long trip to . . . wherever I was headed: Kansas, Texas, Arkansas. ¶ My maternal grandfather, James Brown Richards, did his basic training as a soldier for World War I at Fort Sill in Lawton. The 1918 photographs in the photo gallery below depict a fairly barren place, but now the town has many beautiful tree-lined boulevards, even where the fort remains. After back surgery, I often stayed there as a halfway point between Lubbock, Texas, and Wichita. I would eat at a Chinese restaurant whose name I cannot now recall. ¶ My second trip to Oklahoma came when I was twelve and our church youth drove to visit St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in OKC. I was probably dazzled by the sanctuary at the time, but can recall little of it now. I remember more the dinner afterwards when I ordered fried shrimp. My parents had given me enough money to eat what I wanted . . . I thought. The next day the education director (PG) at the church, who’d been one of the trip sponsors, castigated me for ordering such an extravagant meal when everyone else ate hamburgers and fries. Had I ordered more than I could pay for and the adults had covered for me? Or had the director taken it upon herself to judge me as if she were God? ¶ Oklahoma is a beautiful state, deserves more than a drive-through, particularly the eastern third. Angling northeastward on I-44 in early June, you can see grand rolling hills, even larger ones, the Ouachita Mountains. Unlike the 1930s, when this part of the country suffered great drought, Oklahoma has recently enjoyed anywhere between thirty and fifty inches of rain a year. Verdant stretches of green fields and hedgerows of trees, not to mention veritable forests in the eastern third of the state, as you approach the Ozarks, are eye-popping and inviting. ¶ In 2007, Ken and I, on a trip to Wichita, made a reservation to stay in the Price Tower boutique hotel in Bartlesville. The tower, a Frank Lloyd Wright design, was erected in 1956. The designer had combined what looked like two offices to make one largish hotel room. ¶ The most recent news about Oklahoma is the number of “earthquakes” it has experienced largely, residents assert, because of the practice of fracking by oil companies in the area. The state is also known for one of the last botched executions of a prisoner, when the injection concocted by prison officials did not work properly. ¶ Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state in 1907. Proud Oklahomans celebrated their centennial not that long ago.

Photos 1&2: James Richards on right. Photo 3: James Richards

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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My Journey of States-1 Kansas

1/10/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
The enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot.
William Ralph Inge
Born May 3, 1913, in Independence Township, Kansas.

W. Inge

Introduction

Oceanside, Oregon

With a 2015 visit to Oregon I concluded a life-long tour of the United States—only my first, I hope. The Jespers folk who resided on South Main Street in Wichita were not wealthy, so the only road trips we made were to visit family who lived in other parts of the country. Likewise, as an adult I was a public school teacher with little in the way of discretionary savings, but early on, if I needed to do so I would borrow money to make, for example, my first trip to Hawaii.

1977 Queen's Surf, Author on Right

As I paid back my credit union, month by month, I would recall and cherish favorite scenes from my travels. Upon retiring Ken and I have journeyed out at least twice a year. And so now the list is complete. Some states I only visited once and quite briefly at that. Others I’ve returned to again and again. Yet others I’ve resided in. At any rate, through the years I’ve kept journals, scraps of memorabilia, and photographs, and I would like to share what I’ve enjoyed about our fifty states.

Travel is always a good thing, even if it’s only a few hundred miles away, and the wider your travels take you, the more you may learn about yourself and others. One might think that America is this homogenous mass of people, and, in a way national customs and holidays would imply that it is, but at the same time one must realize that Maine is distinctive from Florida and Arizona and Washington and North Dakota and Kansas and Texas.

I hope to put up at least two posts a week about my visits to all fifty states, a journey I began in the 1950s. Some people who embark on this sort of venture say that one must DO something significant in each state. I do not. One state, Delaware, I passed through as a child in less than an hour, but still I do count it toward my total because I must!

Each post relates anecdotes that make my accounts personal, while also giving short factual information about each state, such as its order of entry into the United States, significant celebrations like centennials, and special events or customs. I am posting personal photographs by way of galleries or slideshows, as well as scans of professional post cards I’ve collected through the years. I hope you will come along for the ride! Share your stories under Comments, your photos at Facebook. I begin with the state where I was born.

1 Kansas

When I was old enough to study geography and scrutinize maps, I realized how isolated the state of Kansas was. In 1957, when it took several days to drive from Wichita to the east coast, I realized an even greater disparity that may not be discernible today. Now you can stay in a Holiday Inn Express in the burg of Garden City, one that’s like thousands of other Holiday Inns, but back then the majority of motels seemed to be individually owned and operated. Back then it appeared that the rest of the country was more established, more sophisticated somehow, than the agrarian state of Kansas. ¶ I later realized the place where I was born and raised profoundly affected who I would be for the rest of my life. My mother, for example, lived on a farm until she went to college and then married my father from New York, whom she called an Easterner, but she never stopped using the word “worsh” whether she was speaking of the laundry, or Worshington DC as if she could not discern the difference—never felt entirely comfortable living in Wichita, a city of 350,000 at the time of her death in 2001. ¶ Even though I left Kansas at the age of twenty-two to attend graduate school in Dallas, Texas, I never stopped considering the little boy buried deep in me, the lad who once played on his grandfather’s discarded tractors and combines, who capered along the crumbling banks of the Arkansas River located a couple of blocks from the home I lived in for over twenty years.

Birthday Tractor 1954

On Grandpa's Tractor, 1955 with Kitty

Whenever I return to the tiny Upchurch cemetery outside Norwich, I am overwhelmed by the sense that I might just belong there with my grandparents, my parents, my sister, and piles of other bones from previous generations. The primordial chant, "Rock Chalk Jayhawk," still gives me chills when I hear it on a ball game on TV. ¶ The school I attended, Southwestern College in Winfield, without a doubt, shaped my life. Sixteen hours of music theory formed the backbone of my music degree. Countless hours of rehearsal at the large Reuter pipe organ in Richardson Auditorium culminated in a senior recital of seven or eight pieces. I still have the scores from which I learned all that music. When I listen to my recital tape, transferred to a CD and my iPod, I shiver to think that I was once that accomplished. Below are from my personal collection of historic travel postcards.

Historical Postcards

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States—Oklahoma

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Farewell to a Piano

11/24/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Because homophobia is still largely driven by the church, it's legitimised. It's also tied to sexism, because those two are never far apart.
Marlon James
Born November 24, 1970

M. James

A Personal Saga

Blessed Fleckstone Piano in Background

From the time I was six years old I knew I wanted to learn. Maybe it was seeing Liberace on TV, or maybe it was hearing Van Cliburn play a concert grand on the radio. My family would visit my grandparents on their farm near Norwich, Kansas, and I would pound on my grandmother’s prized upright, that weathered combination of black-and-white keys, trying to puzzle out how you could make real music. I begged my parents for lessons for another four years. They’d seen me take up one interest after another—chemistry sets, electric trains, toy tractors—so they were in no hurry to indulge me yet again.

But in the summer of 1958, when I was ten, they finally relented and enrolled me in class piano lessons at Wichita’s East High. The venture was probably an experiment. And it was probably cheap, if not free. The teachers had crammed eight or ten studio pianos into one large room, circled up like a wagon train, four little cheeks plastered to each piano bench. There I fell in love with that eighty-eight-key marvel.

Yes, at once I began to make sense of those keys, ebony and ivory. I learned the scale for the key of C with no flats or sharps. Each digit on each hand was assigned a number, the thumb being designated as one. Fingering patterns would become a part of the roadmap I would follow on each piece. Each additional scale, from one sharp or flat to seven had a special pattern four octaves up and back—not that I mastered them all. I had a slothful streak that’s never completely disappeared.

When the summer session was over, my parents, sufficiently convinced that I could learn to play, I guess, bought me, for $150, a reconditioned piano. The technician who rebuilt it—a junior high science teacher—had taken an old upright, sawed three sides off the top, and created a new front, leaving the strings intact against the soundboard. Then at the top he placed mirrors perpendicular to one another on three sides, giving the illusion that the piano was shorter than it really was. He then painted the surface a pinkish beige and cleverly applied those multi-colored flecks so aptly dubbed Fleckstone. That delicate instrument which may have weighed more than half a ton was later given to our church, and I know Mom was happy to reclaim the space in our wee living room. It was not a felicitous situation to have that heavy instrument weighing down the floor of a tiny house with a basement, yet I must say the thing never fell through!

I had to practice when no one was watching TV or needed the living room for something else, so I would grab time when I could. My parents used to tell me, many years later that I would nab thirty minutes here, thirty minutes there. And I always seemed to be prepared for my lessons as well as if I’d sat for two consecutive hours a day. I seemed to progress quickly, soaking up one piece after another. That’s what a learner, particularly, is after: to be able to play something that communicates to those who are in the audience.

I began to take lessons from our church organist who lived across the alley from the church six blocks away. Eleanor, who became a lifelong friend, had two pianos in her front room, and sometimes we would play duets. I advanced so quickly that I passed through two Michael Aaron books in one year. I took lessons for two more years from yet a different teacher and continued to study piano when I took up the organ at age thirteen. When I fell in love with that instrument, my heart turning somersaults, the piano fell by the wayside—in one way, at least. Learning to read music and playing an instrument had been like learning a foreign language, an international, universal language, really. And its gifts, I sensed, might remain with me for the rest of my life. At the time, they seemed to make my life.

Yes, playing the piano saved me from much adolescent misery because I could be the focus of good attention, say, tinkling through a stack of show tunes for a wedding reception, accompanying a group of eighth-grade boys shouting out, “There is Nothing Like a Dame.” If it hadn’t been for the piano my social life would have been a bore. What am I saying? Playing the piano probably prevented me from becoming a criminal, at least one of those nameless delinquents camped out in the principal’s office. In high school I accompanied two groups that frequently left the building to perform for luncheons around the city of Wichita. I accompanied individuals in college including their senior recitals. But by then I also had adopted as my major instrument the organ, and that’s where I would focus the rest of my college career. I would play for various churches in communities where I lived until I gave it up at age thirty to pursue writing instead.

Yet the practice of playing piano remained with me. When I taught elementary for seventeen years, I was often assigned to teach music to my grade level, standing behind a Baldwin studio model as I goaded every throat in the room to sing the same note (or three-parts, even more challenging). When I left Kansas for my life in Texas, my parents gave my Fleckstone piano to our church. I never saw or played it again, and I’m not sure I really cared. The right pedal would often malfunction, and I would have to open the bottom panel and secure the dowel that connected the pedal to whatever dampened the strings—it would become someone else’s problem.

Otherwise I had no access to a piano until 1990 when I had the opportunity to acquire a baby grand, the smallest at forty-eight inches. The Vose and Sons model, probably built in Boston, had spent, I was told by the piano technician who’d reconditioned it, more than forty years in the band room of a college in Plainview, up the Interstate about forty-five minutes from Lubbock. His father-in-law had refinished some of the larger surfaces, but a few nicks existed here and there. It was sort of like the speckled piano of my childhood; I ignored its flaws and accepted it into my life with joy as one would an adopted child. To shore up my decision, however, I had priced brand new ones at around $8,000. I reasoned at the time, that unless I could fill it with gas and drive it to work, the cost would be too dear.

I began to buy musical scores and attempt to teach myself pieces I might have learned when younger. As I had when I was a child, I would spend maybe thirty minutes to an hour practicing—after grading papers for a couple of hours. When I taught English at Lubbock High School for ten years, I decided to volunteer to play one of those pieces in a faculty talent show. When the principal who organized the event placed me at the top of the program, I realized the event was to be more of a comic revue, and he wanted my performance to have serious attention. When I released the last chord, the applause flooded my ears, and as I met my fifth-period (class of ’96) the next Monday, they too clapped for me as I waltzed through my door to take roll and perhaps address (who can recall?) the literary concerns of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It was a gas for my pupils to know that I had more than one dimension to my life, that the dude who was always harping on the passive voice could also memorize Chopin’s “Military” Polonaise, Opus 40, No. 1 and play it with one small error in front of 2,000 high school students.

This child of which I speak, my Vose and Sons, is probably well over sixty-five years old now, but an acoustical instrument can have a long life if it is cared for; its value can increase. That’s why I am at last passing along my piano to the Unitarian Church in Lubbock. I didn’t arrive at this decision with a lot of thought. The writing group to which I belong meets once a month in the church’s main room, and we gladly pay an annual fee for the privilege. More than once in ten years I’ve glanced over at the sad little spinet in the corner and rather cringed whenever someone would sit down to play. They need my piano, it finally occurred to me.

After four months of consideration, the church leadership accepted my offer. They engaged a piano technician to evaluate the instrument. Even though its innards had been replaced in 1990, after twenty-seven years, there was some wear and tear that had to be addressed. It had to be tuned!

On Thursday, November 17, a professional piano mover* transferred my Vose and Sons to the Unitarian Church less than a four-minute drive from our home. I will be able to see it each month, caress its keys if I wish, even play a bar or two. Or maybe I’ll merely wave. And if all goes well, in a short time, I will have acquired a new electronic piano that itself does some amazing things. Stay tuned.

*In case you are in need of a piano mover in the Lubbock area (he does all kinds of moving) call Mark Culver at 806-775-4983. Tell him I think he and his staff did a thoroughly professional job and that I highly recommend them.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

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Michigan (1976)

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS & Trunk Decals

ARIZONA (1975, 1993, 2004, 2017)

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS & Trunk Decals

TENNESSEE (1974)

historical postcards

New Mexico (1972-2018)

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

Mississippi (1971, 1994)

Historical Postcards & Trunk Decals

My Book World

FLORIDA (1968, 1984, 2003)

California ('67, '77, '78, '97, '06, '08)

Colorado (1964, 1965, 1967, 2000, 2011)

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

Connecticut (1957, 1959, 2003, 2006, 2008, 2012)

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

History of an Ablation

History of an Ablation

Delaware (1957)

Historical Postcards

HISTORY OF AN ABLATION

My Book World

My Book World

Maryland (1957, 1959, 1963)

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

My Book World

West Virginia (1957, 1959, 1963)

Historical Postcards

My Book World

6. Illinois (1957, 1959, 1963, 1969, 2006)

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

My Book World

2 Oklahoma

Introduction

1 Kansas

Historical Postcards

A Personal Saga

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